He took the path toward the dower house again the following morning, Hector trotting inevitably in his wake, though it was not his intended destination. That was something altogether different, something for which he had steeled his nerve last night after Pope had lost his appeal—twenty pages of blank verse could do that.
She was at her house before him today. She was standing at the gate—a popular place, that—talking with Tidmouth, who was oozing oily obsequiousness, especially after he spotted Percy approaching. And good God, there was actually a roof on the house, six workers swarming over it, looking diligent.
Percy considered turning away and proceeding with his main plan for the morning, but sooner or later she was going to have to be confronted at more than a dining room table with her aunt and the female baritone to stand between him and embarrassment and humble pie.
“Ah, Tidmouth,” he said after bidding Lady Barclay a good morning, “you are gracing us with your presence and your expertise again today, are you? Cracking the whip?”
“Anything and everything to oblige a lady, Your Lordship,” the man said with a leer, revealing a mouthful of square, yellow teeth. “Cold as the weather is, it being only February and not normally the time of year for such bitter outdoor work, I will put myself and my men to any trouble and inconvenience necessary for the lady to have a roof over her head. No whipping required.”
“Quite so,” Percy said. “I will leave you to it, then. Cousin, may I interest you in a walk?”
She looked at him as though walking with him was the very last thing she wished to do. But perhaps she recognized the inevitability of a tête-à-tête encounter with him sooner or later.
“You may,” she said.
He did not offer his arm, and she did not show any sign that she either needed or expected to take it as she fell into step beside him.
“I believe,” she said stiffly as they moved out of earshot of the man at the gate, “I ought to thank you for intervening on my behalf with Mr. Tidmouth. I was despairing of getting back into my house this year, but he has promised that I will be in next week.”
“You are thanking me, then,” he said, “for making it possible for you to leave me so soon?”
“That would sound ungracious.”
“But true?”
“May I remind you,” she said, “that it was you two evenings ago who lamented the fact that the longer my house was uninhabitable, the longer you were obliged to offer me hospitality in yours.”
“I am sorry about that kiss,” he said. “It ought never to have happened, especially beneath my own roof, where I should be protecting you from insult, not offering it myself.”
“But as you observed at the time,” she said, turning her head away so that he could not see her face around the brim of her bonnet, “it was only a kiss.”
It sounded as if he was not to be forgiven.
They stopped at the top of the broken cliff face with its zigzagging path downward. He had stopped a little farther back two nights ago, on the other side of the gorse bushes, when he had come to see if any smugglers were swarming the beach, cutlasses at the ready—at least, that was what he assumed he had come to see. He had been a bit agitated at the time. His knees felt decidedly weak now, and his breathing quickened.
It was not a windy day, but there was enough of a breeze to make the air nippy. The tide looked halfway in—or halfway out. He had no idea which. Waves were breaking in a line of foam along the beach. The sea beyond them was foam-flecked too. Apart from that, it was steely gray.
“Would you care to go down?” he asked her.
Please say no. Please say no.
“I thought you were afraid of the sea and the cliffs,” she said.
“Afraid?” He raised his eyebrows, all incredulity. “I? Whatever gave you that idea?”
Her eyes searched his face for a disconcerting moment, and then she turned and disappeared over the edge. Oh, nothing quite as drastic as that. She stepped off the cliff-top path and onto the track down and then she kept on going. She did not look back.
He looked down at Hector. “Stay here or trot back home,” he advised. “No one, least of all I, will call you a coward.”
And no one would call him a coward either, by thunder. No one ever had. No one had ever had cause—well, except once. He just happened to be terrified witless of the sea. Ditto of sheer cliffs. Not too fond of golden sands either, mainly because they had a nasty habit of widening and narrowing with the tide—sometimes narrowing to a point at which sea and cliffs joined forces.
Why the devil did he need to prove anything to himself? But it was too late now to change his plan. He could hardly stand up here and wait to wave down at her when she reached the beach.
He launched out into space.